Penn State's Advanced Vehicle Team is making preparations for the third and final year of the EcoCAR 2: Plugging In to the Future competition. The event will be held June 1-12 in Milford, Michigan, and Washington, D.C.

A team of Penn State students received the Best Technical Integration Award at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) inaugural Challenge Home Student Design Competition held April 26 and 27 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.

Triggering rainfall in the Brazilian Amazon jungle is the focus of a Penn State/Brazilian project that is part of the GoAmazon program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and Brazilian agencies.

A Penn State-led team has won a $3 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) for applied battery research. The two-year grant from the DOE's Vehicle Technology Office supports the project "High Energy, Long Cycle Life Lithium-ion Batteries for PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) Applications."

Penn State’s GridSTAR Center will partner with Scitor Corporation on smart grid education and research at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard (The Navy Yard). As a part of this collaboration, Dr. Erfan Ibrahim has been appointed to the position of Strategic Innovations Director for the GridSTAR Center.

Penn State has been named one of only 10 universities to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) inaugural Collegiate Wind Competition, the agency announced April 11. Over the next year, student teams will be challenged to design and construct a lightweight, transportable wind turbine that can be used to power small electronic devices.

Penn State will be part of a new public-private partnership aimed at revitalizing American manufacturing and encouraging companies to invest in the United States. The new partnership, the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII), is a consortium of research universities, community colleges and non-profit organizations from Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and manufacturing firms nationwide.

A generally accepted, 44-year-old assumption about how certain kinds of bacteria make energy and synthesize cell materials has been shown to be incorrect by a team of scientists led by Donald Bryant, the Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology at Penn State and a research professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Montana State University. The research, published in the journal Science on Dec. 16, is expected to help scientists discover new ways of genetically engineering bacteria to manufacture biofuels -- energy-rich compounds derived from biological sources. Many textbooks, which cite the 44-year-old interpretation as fact, likely will be revised as a result of the new discovery.

High energy density batteries that significantly reduce size and improve performance and cell life is the goal of the lithium-sulfur cell technology project led by Penn State and funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The $5 million, three-year grant is part of the DOE's Advanced Vehicle Research and Development program, which aims to improving fuel efficiency of next generation vehicles.

A better understanding of corrosion resistance may be possible using a data-mining tool, according to Penn State material scientists. This tool may also aid research in other areas where massive amounts of information exist.

Local and regional researchers collect large amounts of high quality data on climate change and its effects, but the researchers that create the economic and climate models do not always have access to this information. Now, thanks to a $2 million grant from the Department of Energy, the on-the-ground information will get to the modelers through the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment.